You earn. It goes. By the 20th, you’re asking where.

Every business knows its numbers. Your home is the biggest business you run.

A good duka owner writes down what came in and what went out, and at the end of every month checks the till against the book before starting the next month clean. Nobody calls that being tight. It’s simply how a shop owner knows, without guessing, whether the shop is doing well.

That habit has a name: keeping account. It isn’t a budget. A budget tells you what you may spend. Keeping account tells you what happened, so your next choice is your own.

And it works. Across 138 experiments with about 20,000 people, those who kept track of their progress were more likely to reach their goals, and more so when they wrote it down.¹ Most of those goals were about health, like weight or blood pressure. The habit is the same with money.

Three habits: track it, see it, close it.

1. 1
   Track it. Write it all down, in one place. Every shilling in and out, from M-Pesa, the bank, savings and the cash in your pocket.
2. 2
   See it. Once a month, look at your money drawn out: where it went, who it went to, and what changed from a usual month. A picture shows in seconds what hundreds of messages never could.
3. 3
   Close it. Check that every balance matches what’s really there. Then start the next month clean. How a close works

Simple to say. Hard to keep up.

• Writing down every payment by hand, every day, forever.
• A spreadsheet that was perfect in week one, half-filled in week two, and quietly forgotten by the time the month ended.
• Apps that want your bank login before they show you anything.
• And M-Pesa itself: hundreds of messages a month, each one a line you’d have to copy.

The habit itself is easy. What breaks it, almost every time, is the writing down, so that is exactly the part Jijenga takes off your hands.

You do the deciding. Jijenga does the writing down.

1. 1

   You

   Ask Safaricom for last month’s M-Pesa statement and add it. How to get it

   Jijenga

   Reads every payment in it. Months come in at once, already written down.

2. 2

   You

   Answer the few names it doesn’t know yet.

   Jijenga

   Sorts every payment by where it went and who it went to, and remembers your answers next time.

3. 3

   You

   Tell it what’s in the bank, your savings and your cash.

   Jijenga

   Adds every account into one number: what you have, minus what you owe.

4. 4

   You

   Once a month, confirm each balance with one tap.

   Jijenga

   Closes the month, records any gap honestly, and starts the next one clean.

Nothing here connects to your M-Pesa, and nothing here can move your money. You can delete everything, any time.